3 tips to detox your brain and improve your health
First, Go to sleep as close to 10PM as you can Improving quality of sleep overall is incredibly helpful for mood, focus, energy levels, and health in general. Your body runs on a biological clock that dictates many physiological processes. We have a daily dose of cortisol in the morning to wake us up and a rise in melatonin at night to put us to sleep. If you can act in sync with this rhythm, falling asleep and getting higher quality sleep is much easier.
What our body would prefer for us to do, is to fall asleep just a few hours after the sun goes down. The powerful anticarcinogen and antioxidant melatonin as well as the restorative “youth hormone” -Human Growth Hormone are secreted in their strongest doses between 10PM and 2AM. Ideally you want to go to sleep at 10 pm.
Second, Limit your usage of novelty at a click websites Internet addiction is a real phenomenon. Other things that cause a surge of dopamine include drugs. And, when someone becomes overexposed to dopamine, the dopamine receptors down regulate essentially, the receptors become desensitized. And, it doesn’t have to be surges of dopamine to get you addicted, it can be frequent exposure.
For example the rate of addiction to cigarettes is surprisingly higher than heroin- the difference between the two is you can take puff of a cigarette and get a dopamine rise dozens of times a day, but you’d be passed out or dead before you get anywhere near that frequency with heroin.
The thing with the internet is that websites like reddit , facebook, twitter act like that puff of a cigarette. Swipe for a new picture and you get a bit of dopamine. Scroll down and you get a bit of dopamine. Click on a link and you get a bit of dopamine. You can repeat this hundreds of times throughout the day.
This will desensitize your dopamine receptors and it will be harder and harder to get motivated by activities that aren’t instantly gratifying. The gap between behavior and reward with the internet is incredibly small - it can be half a second. Behavior: move thumb. Reward: funny picture. By using the internet too often, it’s harder and harder for your brain to tolerate more time between behavior and reward. Sites like Imgur can reward you with a funny picture in a couple seconds, but staying focused on a project can take several hours before you’re rewarded with a sense of fulfillment.
Meditation is a great way to deprogram this kind of anxious, instant gratification oriented brain. Meditation has a very long list of health benefits, many of which have been scientifically documented. One huge benefit is that it quiets that constantly talking usually negative inner narrator. The inner narrator is the one saying: I gotta do this, I gotta do that, what should I eat for lunch? There’s actually a network in the brain called the default mode network that is generating this mind chatter. It’s responsible for thinking about your self, thinking about how other people are thinking about you and ruminating about the past and worrying about the future.
Meditation has been shown to reduce activity in the area called the posterior cingulate cortex which is responsible for emotional reactivity. For example, when someone is craving a cigarette, the posterior cingulate cortex strongly lights up. By reducing activity in this region, meditation can help diffuse that anxious, impatient, unfocused and instant gratification oriented mind that the internet helped create.
Third, do some exercise every day. Exercise has benefits beyond what you expect it to do for your body. The positive effects on how it makes your body look pale in comparison to the impressive mental and physiological benefits exercise provides.
Exercise has been shown to help people learn much more efficiently, better deal with stress and drastically reduce anxiety. It improves mood to the point of lifting some people out of depression and it strengthens focus to the point that some ADHD patients elect to throw out their prescriptions.
One big thing exercise does is it raises your levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor - BDNF which directly promotes the growth of new brain cells. Researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for things like learning.
A study in 2007 found that subjects who did high intensity exercise beforehand could master vocabulary words 20% faster than those who remained sedentary. Exercise will also give you more motivation in general.
Exercise triggers the creation of new dopamine receptors meaning you become more sensitive to dopamine, making it easier to be motivated. This will give a boost in willpower and focus to do the things that you want to have had done, not just the things you want to do now.
Going to sleep earlier, meditation and exercise. Pretty simple and straightforward things, but hard to turn into a consistent habit. Though, once these 3 things are implemented they will produce far more reaching benefits both to tour brain and your health overall.
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